Can you be held for 55 years without any charge?
Yes, if you are in Sri Lanka. Last Thursday, eighty three year old Thantriye Singho was released from police custody after 55 years. He was arrested in 1953 and all this time he was never charged with any crime.
Why was he arrested in the first place in a time distant enough that none of us can even remember? He was caught carrying a sword in a suburb near Sri Lankan capital Colombo. It is not clear whether possession of sword was even a crime at that time. Soon after his arrest, the court sent him to a government hospital for psychological evaluation and treatment. He was declared mentally healthy and transferred to regular unit of the hospital. But he spent next 55 years of his life in that hospital without the authority bringing any change against him. A human rights group uncovered his case while doing work on mental patients. They informed the man’s relatives and got a court order for his release.
It is not the fist time this happened in Sri Lanka. Only few months ago, another man was released after spending 50 years in custody without any charge. By the time he got out, he was 80.
6 Liked it 
Loading ...
Owned.
No surprise this happened in Sri Lanka. It’s not the world’s most civilized place, to put it like that.
fuck you raven
We seem to be catching up here in the States..
This is possible in the USA, too.
http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/PoliceState.html
I agree that In US, he would not have suffered in custody for 55 years. You guys would have given him death penalty and finished him off much earlier.
Thats the state of affairs in many countries including India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh etc, not to mention about China !
But, Swearing against those who state the truth is not a nice thing to do. It shows how desperate you are, nothing else.
Quoted :
es says:
17th April 2008 at 5:15 am
fuck you raven
In the US he’d have gotten a free waterboarding and other ‘harsh interrogation’ techniques to boot.
We’ll be seeing more and more of this. The world, despite the rhetoric, is becoming an ever increasing lawless [can you say it like that?] place where the people in power make no bones of detaining people on fictitious charges while the real criminals walk free and unhindered.
I would have expected more from Sri Lanka but I guess perhaps they should try redoing the whole civilization thing. They seem to have started out well but then kind of lost interest.
50 years without charges. If he had tried to escape would he have been shot dead or captured and tried and convicted for escaping from a place he was never convicted to stay in in the first place?
I bet it would have been a convenient solution.
We also don’t know whether he ever tried to regain his freedom by asking what the hell they planned on doing with him.
Sri Lanka, apparently no place to vacation unless you intend to stay awhile.